After being asked, "How do you do that?" enough times (concerning how I make an AVI of my drawings... playing back from start to finish), I decided to make a "How To?" section on my home site. I have a walk through, of 10 steps, from creating an image, to playing back your newly created AVI movie. Go there, and click on "How To?" on my main page. The catch is, you have to have painter in order to create this file. Any version of painter that has scripts should work fine.

Here is my latest movie (image and download hyperlink). The link downloads the AVI format, but I also have it as an SSD on my homepage under "Watch Me Draw."

A point I didn't cover in my tutorial, because I just found out, is that you should create the image in a number that is divisible by 4 pixels, (also... do yourself a huge favor, and find an indeo codec --ver. 5.01 is available-- on the internet, install it on your computer, for maximum compression/maximum quality-- after you install it, it will show up when you make your AVI from Painter).

Post here, or e-mail me, if you have any problems, or if you simply have comments Have fun... and good luck with your AVI movies!!

Inspirational to say the least. I'm looking forward to seeing more scripts from your hand

For the sake of being a baby, I recompressed your muscleface avi using the divx codec.
I gained a 50% decrease with only minimal artifacts.
We're all interested in conserving bandwidth and hd space, so I thought I'd share my experience

Anyone interested in learning about the divx (mpeg4) codec should do a websearch for it.
The official homepage is divx.ctw.cc
It has the codec, but you won't find much other info, so be sure to look around the web for further details.
If anyone is interested in the hard to find 'mpeg4fix' which takes care of certain playback issues, let me know and I'll upload it w/ link.

Digital, could you do me a favor and post that link you mentioned? Also, I had major problems compressing my "Sadness" AVI(11+ meg). Most of my codecs would not compress it due to a "strange file size." Could you look at it? It's on my website, linked in my signerature.

I'm going to check into that divx codec right now. I want to make the files as small as possible, so that helps completely. If you either email me the resulting file, or link to it here, I'll replace the existing one on my site.

I really appreciate your knowlege here. AVI compression is new to me, so any tricks to save size would be great. I was all proud of myself for getting the file down to 916k, so the fact you got it half that size is completely incredible, and I'd love to see/use that file. I may email you if you don't respond here. Thanks a ton, fella

As far as the recompression of muscleface avi, I used the 2.55 meg version, not the 3rd and newest sketch
The resulting avi, after recompressing with the divx codec in Virtual Dub (you can play with the settings) was around 800 kb.
I'm sure it could be compressed even further from a pure uncompressed avi with much better results.

I tried loading the sadness avi to recompress it, but it wouldn't play. Maybe I got a corrupt d/l.

It only fixes playback issues. It doesn't change the encoding in any way. Make sure to follow the install instructions, and make sure you have the divx codec installed already.

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Divx encoded files can be a tricky format to use on a site like yours, because the site receives hits from all kinds of people. Many of whom will likely not have the divx codec installed on their system.

Usually this is not a problem for other codecs, since Media Player simply connects to Microsoft and d/ls the codec in question. However, divx (mpeg4) is not supported by microsoft, and so people have to find and install it by themselves (meaning, it goes beyond the 'point and click' boundary for ordinary folk).

I should have thought of this when I posted my little experiment.

Still, Divx is the best codec out there and those who install it can certainly benefit from its superior quality.

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My advice to you, assuming you have plenty of hd space, is to save the avi from painter uncompressed. Then load it in Virtual Dub and encode it from there (using divx or your favorite codec).
That way you can easily play around and find the optimal settings for your movies, plus the risk of getting a corrupted movie due to Painter issues is significantly less.